Masking techniques for masking data which is sensitive for sharing and disclosing are vastly used for a variety of applications. Masking techniques are used for data testing applications where a real or an original data is masked against disclosure during the testing phase. Further, in recent years, various companies across the globe have progressed to outsource their work to other companies within or outside their countries. With the work being outsourced, companies need to share a variety of data outside, for example, over a network, for execution of tasks by the support or offshore teams. The shared data may include data of customers which may be sensitive for sharing and disclosing. Typically, encryption techniques and administrative controls are employed to allow only authorized users to view such data. However, in some cases even the authorized users should not view all of the data and the sensitive data may have to be protected from disclosure.
In order to protect the sensitive data from disclosure, even to the support or offshore teams, for the execution of tasks, data masking techniques are implemented. Data masking techniques are typically categorized as Static Data Masking (SDM) techniques and Dynamic Data Masking (DDM) techniques. In a SDM technique, the sensitive data is masked, and the masked data is then stored in a database before being displayed to a user based on client's request. On the other hand, in a DDM technique, an application is run to query a database based on a client's request and the sensitive data is masked during the execution of the application and a suitable output is displayed to a user. Although, it may be evident that the DDM techniques are superior and emerging techniques, it may still be important to mask the sensitive data in an efficient manner before being displayed to users and to reduce a risk to disclosure of sensitive data.